It’s been an interesting month. I started it over in Beijing, for the Beijing Perl Workshop. It’s the first Perl event that I’d been to in China, and it was a great experience. People were very friendly and welcoming, the venue was nice and cool (good job, since I had a hard time coping with the Beijing summer heat), I had a good audience and good response to my talks, and the meals before and after it were great too. I gave two full-length talks, plus a lightning talk:

I got to see various things in Beijing. I avoided a couple of the most famous attractions – I saw them last time I was in Beijing, and they’re incredibly crowded mid-summer – and instead enjoyed some of the still wonderful, but maybe slightly lesser known ones. I managed to get a decent bit of hacking in too, mostly because I simply can’t handle being outside for too long in high temperature and humidity. Happily, I had a hotel that provided both wired and wireless internet with the room, and a couple of free beers a day too!

Anyway, that was my fun conference trip of the month. This was also the month where I took my one totally laptop-free vacation of the year. That was just the mental and physical break I needed from the hacking, though of course I couldn’t totally break away from things and ended up reading The Art of the Metaobject Protocol on the journey there and back. I’d read a couple of extracts from it before, but this was the first time through the whole book. It was decidedly worthwhile, though it shows its age a little at times too! ;-)

Amongst the trips, I’ve got some decent work in on the “nom” branch. It’s going well – a look at the excellent new compiler features page shows that there’s not too many areas left where we lack things (at least on that list) that master has. On some features, we’ve decidedly pulled ahead of master too. I’ll write up some more detailed news soon, but overall, we’re making good progress.

Excitingly, YAPC::Europe is now not far off too! Last year I had one talk, so it was relatively relaxing. This year, I’ve twotalks, but also a full day teaching class on OOP in Perl 6. So, I’m busily preparing for all of that too, and of course very much looking forward to seeing lots of familiar – and new – faces there. :-)

Anyways, my patches for today are pushed, and my beer glass is empty, so I guess it’s time to take a little rest.